ylastic blog

You have all your domains nicely imported into Route53 using Ylastic. You have scheduled backups of your zones to the S3 bucket of your choice for DR using Ylastic. You do have those zones backed up, right? You can view an audit trail of all the changes/additions/updates being made to your zones in Ylastic. And now you can view the spending break-down for all of those zones in Ylastic Plus. View the spending for the current month, previous month, curent year or the last year.

Easily view the cost associated with each of the zones you are hosting in Route53. The chart also displays the total number of queries made for the displayed zones in the chosen time period.

More integrated cool tools for Route 53 in the pipeline. Manage your AWS cloud, the easy way!

Ylastic can now backup all your Route53 hosted zones to S3. Each of your hosted zones will be exported to BIND zone file format and saved to the S3 bucket of your choice. Sounds complicated? How about as simple as select the zones to backup, pick a bucket and click a button.

We love simple, so we extended it to also give you the ability to schedule your Route53 backups on a recurring time period of your choice :-)

Manage your AWS environment, the easy way!

In the midst of all the recent EC2 excitement, we released an easy to use point and click wizard for creating your IAM policies along with the ability to setup repositories for storing them. This will greatly simplify your workflow when setting up and using IAM policies. Currently you can use S3 buckets as policy repositories, and we are also adding support for other kinds of repositories.

Select your repository and you can create a new IAM policy using the wizard. You create statements and then generate a policy from it.

Select the actions for your policy. We have separated the actions by category for EC2 so it is easy to find what you need :-)

Specify a resource if you like.

Add any optional conditions to apply to this statement.

Click to add this statement. You can add more statements and when you are ready, generate a policy from these statements.

Provide a name for this policy file so we can save it to your repository. That's it! Now this policy will be available to you everywhere in Ylastic that you need access to it.

So if you need to assign this policy to one of your IAM groups or users, click the assign policy button and select it!

SImple and easy to use IAM management :-)

AWS announced CloudFormation for creating complex infrastructures or environments called stacks that are composed of multiple AWS resources working together. Sound exciting? Yep. We think so too. Ylastic just released complete support for managing and monitoring this service, making it that much more easier for you to build your infrastructure in the cloud. Jeff Barr has a nice explanation of some of the CloudFormation basics in his post. Ylastic lets you setup repositories that contain your templates. Currently these are S3 buckets, and support for other kinds of repositories is in the works.

We retrieve all of the templates in your repositories automatically and have them available whenever you need to create a stack from these templates. You can view estimated hourly and monthly costs that will be incurred when you create a stack from a template. The CloudFormation team provides several samples for you to get started, and these are automatically available to everyone. 

View the body of a template to see the structure.

Get a nice visualization of the template if you prefer pictures :-)

Create a stack from a template of your choice. Specify a name for the stack and region. You can even edit the template if you want to make some last minute changes prior to creating the stack. 

Specify any parameters that may be required by this template.

Select the metrics that you want to monitor for this stack.

Choose how you want to receive any alerts generated.

That's it! Click create and CloudFormation will get to work its magic, creating all the resources in the correct order. On your stacks page you can view your stacks and all their associated resources, events, and other info.

Each stack makes available a list of actions that are being taken when the stack is being created. 

Incurred costs for a stack for the current month are displayed along with a total for all of your stacks.

Select a stack to view all associated resources, grouped by resource type :-)

Your instances and db instances will display a sparkline graph of the CPU util over the last 10 min, and load balancers will all display the latency for the last 10 minutes.

Click the sparkline to get complete cloudwatch metrics for the resource.

Click the group heading for a resource to navigate to the respective Ylastic page for that resource so you can dig deeper into it.

Filter the resources and view details where appropriate.

Here is the WordPress welcome page from this stack.

Here is an alert for this stack sent as a DM on twitter.

Stack changes are tracked as part of the normal ylastic audit trail.

A hat tip to Taimur, Reto, Chris and rest of the folks from the CloudFormation team for all their hard work on this new service. We have lots more goodies on the way. Stay tuned :-)

You can easily provide access to objects in your S3 buckets for a specified period of time to anyone by giving them a signed limited time URL. On the s3browser page in Ylastic, select the object that you want to provide access to, and select "Generate Public GET URL" from the menu.